Andrew Famiglietti: Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians: The Political Economy and Cultural History of Wikipedia (2011)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · collaboration, floss, hacker culture, knowledge, knowledge production, open source, peer production, political economy, wikipedia
“This dissertation explores the political economy and cultural history of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It demonstrates how Wikipedia, an influential and popular site of knowledge production and distribution, was influenced by its heritage from the hacker communities of the late twentieth century. More specifically, Wikipedia was shaped by an ideal I call, “the cyborg individual,” which held that the production of knowledge was best entrusted to a widely distributed network of individual human subjects and individually owned computers.
I trace how this ideal emerged from hacker culture in response to anxieties hackers experienced due to their intimate relationships with machines. I go on to demonstrate how this ideal influenced how Wikipedia was understood both those involved in the early history of the site, and those writing about it. In particular, legal scholar Yochai Benkler seems to base his understanding of Wikipedia and its strengths on the cyborg individual ideal. Having established this, I then move on to show how the cyborg individual ideal misunderstands Wikipedia’s actual method of production. Most importantly, it overlooks the importance of how the boundaries drawn around communities and shared technological resources shape Wikipedia’s content. I then proceed to begin the process of building what I believe is a better way of understanding Wikipedia, by tracing how communities and shared resources shape the production of recent Wikipedia articles.”
Doctor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies / Communication, 2011
Dissertation Committee: V. Ekstrand, N. Patterson, R. Gajjala, D. McQuarie, D. Parry
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
290 pages
Vincent Mosco: The Political Economy of Communication, 2nd ed (1996/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · communication, gender, globalisation, political economy, race, surveillance
The Political Economy of Communication provides a thorough coverage of an important area of communication studies: the political economy approach to media.
This highly successful text has been thoroughly updated, restructured and rewritten in this new edition, clearly demonstrating how power operates across all media, from newspapers to Facebook, and how media power intersects with globalization, social class, race, gender and surveillance.
– Provides a summary of the field of political economy, looking at its history and major schools of thought
– Highlights the work of key figures and differences that established the divide between economics and political economy
– Explains the necessity of media students to understand the general political economy tradition and the way in which it informs the political economy of communication
– Addresses the interdisciplinary nature of the field, with its links to economics, geography and sociology, and cultural and policy studies
This book offers a unique overview of the field of political economy of communication and will be of use to upper level undergraduate and graduate students of media and communication.
Publisher Sage Publications, 2009
ISBN 1412947006, 9781412947008
268 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-5-31)
Comment (1)Craig Calhoun, Georgi Derluguian (eds.): Aftermath: A New Global Economic Order? (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · economy, finance, financial crisis, neoliberalism, political economy, politics
The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream economic predictions. At the same time, it showed the vulnerability of the world’s richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China, India, Brazil and other countries are growing faster than Europe or America and they have weathered the crisis better. Will they be new world leaders? And is their growth due to following conventional economic guidelines or instead to strong state leadership and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic not only to the question of which countries will grow in coming decades but to likely conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic cooperation.
Contributors include: Ha-Joon Chang, Piotr Dutkiewicz, Alexis Habiyaremye, James K. Galbraith, Grzegorz Gorzelak, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Manuel Montes, Vladimir Popov, Felice Noelle Rodriguez, Dani Rodrik, Saskia Sassen, Luc Soete, and R. Bin Wong.
Aftermath is the third part of a trilogy comprised of the first three books in the Possible Future series. Volume 1: Business as Usual; Volume 2: The Deepening Crisis; Volume 3: Aftermath.
Publisher NYU Press; with Social Science Research Council, 2011
Possible futures series, Volume 3
ISBN 0814772838, 9780814772836
296 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-14)
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